


Gratuitous Violence: Wanted.

by his tongue and liver (doubleinfinity)



Category: Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: Demonic Possession, I imagine the Walrider's personality to be playfully violent, Journalism, M/M, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, Other, Post-Asylum, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sexual Tension, Teasing, brief drabble intro, waylon is the walrider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-25
Updated: 2018-06-25
Packaged: 2019-05-28 12:21:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15048920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doubleinfinity/pseuds/his%20tongue%20and%20liver
Summary: They get out of Mount Massive. They have their livers and kidneys and spines and most of their toes. But Waylon brought a creature home.OrA fic in which the Walrider is a demon instead of a nano-swarm.





	1. 0.5/1.0. wanted: the lungs, the ribs.

_I am not afraid of death_ , Miles writes in his head, eyes widened as he looks into the face of decomposition. About to be killed dead, and his fucking mind snaps back to its traditional narrative style, as though he isn’t going to putrefy in Mount Massive. As though he’ll get the chance to put these thoughts down on paper someday. As though he isn’t stepping through rotting corpses right now, heels wet with humanlike fluids and clumps of skinrot.

_Knowledge is not a thing. It’s a shape:_

_A trail of synaptic pathways, somas and axons and dendrites reaching for other bodies. Knowledge is the path carved out by neurotrophic factor in my gray matter._

_When I’m under the ground, the spores will eat me, and all the knowledge I’ve acquired will be absorbed into the earth. Somewhere, if I’m lucky, maybe a fungal mass will grow in the same configuration as one of my neural connections, its body reaching for the truth._

_I am not afraid of death_ , he tries to reassure himself. _There are no individual people_. (Just masses. Under my feet).

_Humanity occurs over and over, the same way, across billions of bodies. The songs we play today reach for the literature we wrote centuries ago. They map onto each other. We are reoccurring / I am excessive / I will not be pruned. I will happen a million more time. I have_ happened _a million times._

But when Miles _does_ get out, he never ends up writing any of this down. He barely even speaks of the memories from Mount Massive.

In the asylum, with death stretched across every tile, his heart beat frantically with terror despite the words being recorded by his head. He did not regard his demise as flippantly as he tried to persuade himself.

In that time, Miles would have sold every square inch of his humanity just to stay alive.

And Waylon… well, Waylon would have bought it all.


	2. 1.0/1.0.  demonfucker, beastfucker, devilwaker.

You’d think, with the amount of hands that’ve been around his throat in the recent past, that Miles would take one look at this situation and run, a Hermes-kindled fire of ptsd lit under his feet.

What happens instead is this: he leans into Waylon’s grasp and gently gets the oxygen choked from his lungs.

The smaller male’s calloused thumb presses against his temple mercilessly, white-angel flesh turned scaly by the rigor of the elements. Even through lidded blinks, his consciousness wavering, he sees Waylon’s blonde halo fitted too tightly around his skull. The ventricles in his brain will swell and pop, no room for any other brain matter except the fight-or-flight center. This is not what is the matter. Even this mangled boy pretending to kill him draws no fear from Miles.

When the knuckles uncurl, Miles draws back coughing, dragging his hands to his neck and pressing gently on the bruises that are blooming. He imagines it as a circlet around his neck, kissing him, kinging him. He sees it as a violence that has the power to take back all of the violence ever done against him. And that feels good: this too-tight responsibility, as he nurses one intake of air for too long, and spots eat up his vision.

They both have burnt patches that will never heal. They both have uprooted slices of skin that will not drop away as scabs. So much of the history is visible, which is maybe why they repulse each other. Disgusted enough to want to slide their tongues together, as it apparently is.

Waylon leans back, kneecaps sinking into the moist, muddy ground behind the chapel. Miles is melting into it too, but backwards, and he dreads the idea of getting back into his car this gross. The sermon is still going on inside, but neither of them could stand the idea of sitting through another false echo of the things they’ve given too much thought to, and sequentially abandoned.

“The young preachers are a waste,” Miles murmurs aloud, that image of the early-twenties male swaddled in a black tapestry reading verbatim scripture caught in his mind. “There’s so much more they could be doing while they’re still ignorant.”

Dipping forward, the blonde male hooks his front fingers underneath Miles’ collar, tugging him nearer.

“ _You’d_ look pretty, though,” Waylon purrs, flashing out his fingers so that his hand curls around Miles’ neck, unsqueezing. “It’s erotic, isn’t it? The young blood _burning up_ in those robes. That fresh body all locked up and wasting, waiting for somebody to seduce him out of his relationship with God.”

Miles looks down. Sees bodies. “I know the feeling,” he answers lowly.

His fingers slide into the soft, yielding dirt, pressing down to a cooler layer that hasn’t yet felt the sun. Springtime is arching over rapidly, dousing Maryland in a pervasive moistness that offsets the effects of slightly longer stretches of sunlight. It’s a teasing amount of warmth, really.

Against the backdrop of mud, Waylon looks even more jaundiced, his skin weakly holding to his bones in spores of yellow. When he smiles, a gruesome display of teeth curve out from his lips. He smiles now.

“You seem distressed,” he comments. “Are you full? Because I’m hungry.”

Hopeful, cautiously, Miles leans forward in the dirt, glancing fitfully around himself. Beyond the mauving-white of the church clapboards, a bed of flowers and splash of grass precede the untamed land that the two are laying in, which then proceeds to stretch towards a collection of graves of twisted wood. There are no people meandering up the walkways, just cars parked along the side for the church goers. What would they think if they saw? And what would they do if they knew what they were seeing?

Miles turns back, meeting Waylon’s blue and icy challenge. “You know I am,” he answers breathlessly, rushing to comply. He scoots forward, extending his wrists out for Waylon to take.

Waylon, who…

The blonde boy grins, laughingly grabbing the male’s exposed veins in his grasp. The sound comes from his throat, and even with just that rough and hollow input, Miles knows that Waylon finds him pitiful. He seems delighted by it. “Close your eyes, my boy,” he speaks, voice suddenly not at all representative of the man Miles met in the asylum, when the two of them were racing through the halls. “I’m going to pick one.”

Compliantly, Miles stretches his neck up, letting his mouth drop open in a humiliating show of deference. The inhabited boy lets Mile’s jaw hang that way for a moment, letting the degradation sink in.

After a chuckle, Waylon leans forward, opening his mouth wide to match Miles’ pose. It hasn’t changed; it’s like a kiss that never happens. Instead of tongue and sweetness, a cloud of black smoke spills out from his lips, drifting past Miles’ teeth, onto his tongue, down his throat. It’s a bitter, oily taste that makes him cringe, maybe more in the anticipation of it than the actual sensation. (But God, he craves the sensation).

Immediately, Miles feels a finger flicking through his memories as though they’re bound to a Rolodex, drawing Mount Massive memories to the surface of his consciousness. Some of them Waylon lingers on a little too long, drawing out the ache that they come with. And then, all at once, Miles feels a memory tear from the set, ripped from the binder ring. The demon inside Waylon grips the branch of a dendrite and uproots it from the brain, eating the memory.

As Miles leans back shaking, searching his mind for what’s missing and only coming to an empty crater, he distinctly feels the way he used to before he started taking prescription benzo’s, when he’d chug a bottle of Nyquil to get to bed in hotel rooms: that sour swill of medicine followed by the warming simmer of sleep in his belly.

He’s comforted and disturbed by the fact that he will never know _which_ memory has been taken. But he feels strangely empty, as though he’s been turned upside-down and the bulk of him has been shaken out.

Above all else, he desperately wishes that Waylon would take away the one he always dangles in front of Miles before sinking his teeth in.

The neuron that reaches for the empty gap finds a nothingness where it used to be, and reroutes to the memory map he has left. He hasn’t been down every route, but he’s come to the center of the map more times than he can count.

In the middle of the labyrinth is a memory of running: through a generic asylum corridor, from a variant who was getting too close, Waylon and Miles almost side-by-side. It had happened a dozen times before, and was likely to happen a dozen times again- except in this memory, Miles pushes him. This memory, where the blonde falls to the floor and Miles doesn’t look back, even when he hears his neck snap. Even when he hears the variant catch up to his limp body.

But when he does finally dart behind an arch and peek his head back down the hallway… when he does, the sight of Waylon rising like a puppet controlled from the inside, a dark mass swirling around him until completely sucked inside. The boy who was no longer a boy glaring a sharp grin down the dark hallway at Miles before grabbing the variant by the neck and throwing him into the ceiling.

✒

Waylon sits on the kitchen island, fingertips splayed out on the metal surface. There’s a bowl of apples to his left, which he bats away from him, each crimson globe rolling bruised onto the floor.

It’s not a big house. A one-story experience, where most of the rooms bloom into one another, distinguished simply by stark differences in the flooring textures. (Kitchen, tile; living room, thin-fiber carpet; dining area, wooden boards). His kitchen is slightly chrome, with its gleaming silver countertops stacked around the perimeter. They’re mostly occupied by appliances and magazines and loose pages perforated from academic journals. Miles usually uses the island to prepare dinner. But Waylon is on it right now, and neither of them are hungry.

The space below the blonde’s eyes are purple and dark, a blue quaff of unreadable color. He extends an arm out, long-sleeves nearly reaching his fingertips.

“Give that to me,” he demands of Miles, fingers directing towards the knife block on the counter by the fridge.

He looks younger somehow. Younger than Waylon ever did when they were inside the asylum. He carries a playful boyhood inside of his body and it scares Miles more than the calculated rage of a man. Men, he understands. This thing he cannot reckon with.

 _Which one_? he is on the verge of asking when the handle of a medium-sized knife jerks out of the wooden block slightly farther than its neighbors, distinguishing itself.

When Miles hesitates, Waylon angrily yanks it towards him through space, the clean swoosh of the blade upending the air by Miles’ head. The boy catches it in his palm, twisting his fingers around its hilt. “Really, Miles,” he states impassively with a blink, hoisting himself off the surface and landing delicately on the kitchen floor. “I’m not going to kill you. After all this.” He works his way around the other’s back, slipping by his ear. “After all we’ve been through together.”

He walks towards the fridge that stands at the border of the kitchen, before the line is drawn for the living area. He opens its doors, pulling a lime from the bottom shelf. “Let’s have a drink,” he insists.

✒

Bottles are poured, citrus is sliced, rims are salted. Tongues are dipped.

Waylon sits on the arm of Miles’ couch, legs facing away but head angled towards the television. Miles watches him nervously, reluctantly sipping lime-imbued tequila. He observes the clearness of Waylon’s skin, the bright blue flash of his eyes amplified by the television’s gleam. No more is the flesh-sewn creature who lay in the church cemetery with him today. He would not be able to mark down Waylon as any older than a teenager, let alone in his 30’s. The strangeness of this is counteracted almost entirely by the fluid, aged way that the creature speaks.

A thrumming seems to come from Waylon’s skin, an ancient rattling in a hollow jar. Even with the male’s attention fixed on the ridiculous reality tv show, he seems to be soaking up information and repeating back everything he knows in an enticing, subtle tone. Miles feels an overwhelming urge to stand up and waltz with him to it. To kick away all of the journals he’d been reading before the asylum happened, back when he was able to study and learn. Now nothing seems more important than sinking into the shadow of this strange and terrifying non-human composition.

“Hey,” Waylon speaks suddenly, his eyes on Miles. “Wouldn’t it be funny if you forgot who your parents were?”

Miles feels a tinge of panic twist inside him, his brain freezing up. He tries to close his eyes, focus on the slosh of bitter alcohol against his lips, but his mind reluctantly turns to the question. His parents.

He reaches until his eyes strain with the effort, his pulse throbbing with pain. He reaches for their names, their voices, until his brain aches and he feels terror curl up inside his chest and make a permanent bed for itself. He can’t remember _anything_ about his childhood. He can’t remember anything except for the six months before the asylum happened to him.

“Huh,” the other male chimes, turning back to the tv. “Maybe you had too much to drink.”

“Waylon…” Miles whispers. This must be the emptiness he felt after the creature had infiltrated him and taken a memory. Taken _memories_. He hadn’t known so much could be done at once. Hadn’t known what to go back and look for.

The blonde nods towards the drink pressed between Miles’ kneecaps. “You make a poor host, Miles. Don’t let me drink alone.”

The wording isn’t lost on Miles. “Waylon,” he repeats, louder.

Waylon snaps back, his face contoured in anger. “Don’t call me that name,” he orders. His voice is different. Hard, shadowed. Too many decibels and too little octaves. “Call me by _my_ name.”

“I don’t know your name,” Miles answers, sheepish. He can’t look at the deep, swirling darkness in the other’s eyes or he’ll get sucked into them.

The blonde laughs out a jovial taunt. “I didn’t take _that_ memory. You know.”

Miles thinks back to the scene that haunts him. He sees himself kill Waylon; he sees some formless creature enter Waylon and pick him back up. Some evil entity born in Mount Massive’s walls? Something he’s read about in folklore? Or-

“The Walrider,” he answers.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Waylon give a sharp, delighted nod. Scared, Miles raises the glass back to his lips, the ice clinking nervously as he tips a clear, burning flush down his throat. He’s buzzing with the first signs of impairment, thoughts trailing a second behind the reality. He’s never felt this weak before, but then, he’s never been so much less of himself before. The vast majority of his lifespan scooped out of his cranium. He’s empty.

“Do you…?” Miles stammers, squeezing his eyes shut. “Do you want to be the only thing I remember?”

Waylon seems to give this some thought, resting his chin on the rim of his glass. “I only want the important parts about you to stay,” he responds. Such a sweetness, in that deception. Such that Miles can let himself believe it. “This is important.” He gestures downward, drawing attention to the translucent green-clear liquid Miles has spilled all over his lap because his hands are shaking so hard. The creature operating Waylon’s body gently relieves him of the glass, setting it safely on the coffee table.

“Poor boy,” he coos, turning his attention back to the tv. “You just don’t understand what a gift your body is. Rare, and precious… that that sperm and egg happened to meet when it did. Do you know how much more likely it was to have not?” He flashes through the possibilities, to when Mile’s brainstem was just an embryonic bud, prepared to unfurl. “I do.” He sips.

Eyes trained on the television, Miles absently observes the over-saturated characters, but his pupils are too large to actually see any of it. The presence at his side tears through his senses. Every groove in his brain is flooded with it. He has to get out of here.

He flings the drink to the floor, jumping to his feet and making a frenzied break for the fire escape.

Poised on the arm of the couch, Waylon lets the man go, languidly watching as the desperate creature yanks up the kitchen window and stumbles out of it. He takes an unhurried sip of his drink, savoring the tangy burn as it glides across his tongue and sinks into the fire of his belly. It sits there, burning away his organs, this body’s digestive tract long since shut down.

When he finally rises to his feet, the boy’s body hangs loosely around his spirit. Yeah. It’s time to shuck this one off.

He rolls his shoulders, joints popping.

Outside, Miles’ muscles strain as he races down the thin grating of the fire escape, trying to avoid tumbling over the edge. The night is loud and windy, cars racing along the busy street below the apartment. His arms and wrists shiver under the pressure of clinging too hard to the railings.

When he’s close enough to ground level, he leaps over the edge to bypass the final steps, jumping onto the sidewalk. The cars whip by his face, a barrier that prevents him from immediately rushing across the street and getting as far away from this fucking place as he can.

Fearful of what he will see, Miles dares to look back at the steel structure to check if he’s being pursued. His eyes find Waylon crawling down the ladder six flights above him, body contorting in unnaturally rapid shapes.

Their gazes meet, Waylon’s horrible shelled-out eyes digging into his. “Catch,” he grins as he rolls over the edge of the railing.

Miles yelps as the blonde’s body flutters through the air. The black, oily form of the Walrider streams out of his skin, leaving the empty body plummeting to the ground. It’s by instinct alone that Miles puts his arms out to catch him. The force knocks him to the ground. Their bodies lie in a two-man heap, just asking for the Walrider to sort through them.

As Miles rockets to his feet, he dares to seek out the Walrider against the dark sky. It’s too difficult to discern anything, so he hefts Waylon across his arms and starts to run across the street, evading vehicles.

Car horns blare in his ear, sending him dodging back and forth against auditory threats. One car finally comes to a squealing stop inches from his feet and the jolt causes him to drop Waylon in the middle of the road.

 _I’m sorry,_ he offers wildly as he zigzags his way to the other side of traffic, unable to turn back. His life has become an endless cycle of putting himself before Waylon. He doesn’t know if he’s going to have to pay for it again.

Miles dashes down the sidewalk and through a strip of foliage, realizing that he has no idea where he is. He doesn’t know what the name of this city is. Doesn’t know these streets or where they go or how he’d even know which complex was his if he had to get back to it.

He freezes as a set of moist, icy fingers climb up his neck.

“Did you want to beg for that memory back?” the Walrider asks him, his voice a dissonant rustling that seems to bend no hair cells. “Or maybe another one that’s more important? Wait- but how will you even know which ones are missing…?”

The fingers dancing across his back sudden spear into him, two sets of hands dipping beneath his skin. The Walrider submerges his arms into Miles’, taking control over the two limbs. He feels as the Walrider forces him to grip his forehead in conflict and sway crazily.

“Please, please, please give it back,” the Walrider mocks him, tearing at his eyes in a show of desperation. He just as suddenly drops the arms, giving Miles control over his body once more.

“Sorry Miles,” he answers himself, “Can’t do that. I can’t restring something I’ve already torn up and thrown away.”

Shivering, Miles turns to face the smoky creature, its eyes a burning kind of luster set deep into its head. The amber color swirls like wine in a black glass, beads forming at the surface. Miles lunges in and dives his own arms through its body, submerging himself into the misty, slick substance of the demon’s body. It’s the consistency of sludge, with the nature of quicksand. He pulls back to wrench himself out and finds himself stuck. He jerks away again, trying to free himself.

The Walrider lets out a quiet chuckle, advancing. The awkward posture of Miles’ trapped body ends up with him toppling to the ground, afraid that he is about to be trampled. But the Walrider snaps back, forcing Miles’ arms to dislodge with a sucking sound.

He comes away with black fluid clinging to his skin.

“So curious,” the Walrider comments, somehow smiling. “You may not remember being a reporter, but your character endures. That’s wonderful.”

Miles shakes, cold and afraid. The black sludge covers the dark muscles of his forearms and the scars that’ve upset his skin. But somehow, the sensation is akin to that of a balm. It feels healing.

“You know, men like you would give a lot for a chance to start over. Leaf through all the bad things they’ve done, and… bam. Cut away. Just like that.” He takes a step back, crossing his phantom arms. “I mean, Miles, you haven’t learned anything from it. Why not do away with it?”

The creature slinks forward, snakelike as it flits through the air. His hand reaches out and passes through Miles’ face. It feels little more than moisture collecting near him, but then he feels it crawl up into his head; a fist curls around the outer surface of his mind, caressing the grooves. “Just ask me to.”

Squeezing his eyes shut. Miles shakes his head. “No- I just- want to go home.”

The Walrider pets his brain, sending a hefty burst of pleasure through his body. With it comes a bright new memory; an internal map of this town. He suddenly remembers where his apartment complex is. The way to it is lit by bright vibrations in white.

The demon holds onto his brain, twisting through the air to land right on Miles’ shoulders like a backpack. His middle finger scratches against a cluster of neurons, making Miles yelp. The creature laughs as Miles’ arms betray him, reaching down to loop his legs through them.

“Then let’s go,” he suggests.

Across the street, two oncoming cars rocket out of control, spinning into the middle of the road and creating a pile-up that completely blocks the road. Somebody screams as the tires come to a squealing stop and the sound of metal and glass raining onto the asphalt.

Miles and his demonic presence are free to cross the open street.

✒

He learns to live with it constantly hovering around his shoulders.

When cutting dinner, Miles’ fork and knife sometimes dance around in his hands. When he sits down to read and put some of his remaining memories on paper, spontaneous events spring into his head, distracting him from the targeted recollection. He frequently wakes in the middle of the night, pulse pounding, seeing feet scamper along the outside of his door, death clutching at the nape of his neck, nightmare horrors fresh in his head.

And all there ever is is him. He knows nothing except for the familiarity of his own body. Sometimes he remembers the asylum. Always he remembers the Walrider.

Tonight, he wakes up suddenly, eyes shooting open. There is a cosmos on the ceiling; gold and orange stars streak across the white boards, mixed into milky swirls that spiral through the night. He can feel his bed beneath him, but also another sensation, like the Walrider is lying directly inside of him, in the same position. He lifts his hand and the comforting inky sensation follows in perfect symmetry.

“Waylon…” he murmurs to himself.

His hand picks itself up and caresses his own cheek. The fingers dance over his eyes, coveting them. Something burns hollow, deep into his core. His emotions and the Walrider’s stack, then fuse, and he doesn’t know which is his.

The Walrider is stronger- even stronger than when they met. He’s feasted on Miles until almost nothing of substance is left. And the best parts of him have been saved for last: the worst he’s done, the worst he’s felt about a decision he made. The weight of loss, if not for the life he sacrificed, then for his own.

Miles’ hand wraps around his throat, squeezing gently. Then it ceases to be gentle. He gets the air choked out of him.

“Men like you make good men like me,” the presence rumbles from inside of him.

And even when the Walrider lets go of Miles’ fingers, the male still keeps them wrapped tightly around his jugular, crushing his neck in his grasp.

The demon lets this go on for a minute, then snaps back into control. He wrenches Miles’ hand away from him, sinking both into the mattress at his sides. "Mi-les,” he chides as the male heaves upward with a cough, his upper body reeling in all the oxygen it can find. “This is my body. You just share it.”

And he’s right.

This isn’t his body.

All that’s ever made him _him_ was the specific layout of his brain: his knowledge, his memories, his skills. And every strand of that has been torn out. Miles doesn’t know a lot, but he knows that in every way that counts, he doesn’t exist anymore.

He blinks and the ceiling is white again, his husk cold and empty. The Walrider has streamed out of his body and is floating above him.

“Please,” he croaks. “Please come back.”

The oily creature fills him from within, and once again, he is whole.


End file.
